Throughout high school he did the usual ghettonerd things: he collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s 7,” could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi battle pod, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like “indefatigable” and “ubiquitous” when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school. He read Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his favorite character was, of course, Raistlin) and became an early devotee of the End of the World. He devoured every book he could find that dealt with the End Times, from John Christopher’s “Empty World” to Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth.”

So, comfortably racist sf & f genre? Take your genre authenticity and shove it. When we do us, when fangirls and fanboys write our chromatic realities, when we verb noire, we rise above you and garner awards that you couldn't dream of in your sf & f ghetto. You don't even need to recognize. Because those that have made you outcasts on account of your fidelity to genre? You've elided yourself. When Mike Chabon is given geek cred and folk like PAD are laughed at by other white writers who are publishing in the New Yorker and any Norton Anthology of choice? You've erased yourself from the conversation. When other scions of other racist institutions see us writing/creating/speaking our truths to power? And when we rock hard at it, they prefer to call us 'magical realists' or 'psychic storytellers' or award winning geniuses or whatever, and our books have ghosts, and tech, and monsters (that aren't based on us, though they are sometimes based on the likes of you). White people that don't consider you colleagues award us with Litcrit honors and this after those of us who write like such outsell you. When it comes down to is that amongst the fanboy and fangirl hordes, there are those who become writers within the genre, but outside of 'dom: what is often said of genre names that do come up in conversation is something not unlike, "Will who?"

I'm thinking, maybe the price to be paid for turning entire people groups, and its members, into narrative tropes that glorify manifest destiny and colonization--and persisting in this-- is that when the metanarrative begins to magnify the humanity of all people-- not only the white ones-- the hidebound genre elides itself.